George Packer's Blog, page 175

A Mauritanian Abolitionist Visits the United States

At the end of June, Biram Dah Abeid, an anti-slavery activist from Mauritania who has led that country’s most successful abolitionist movement, arrived in the United States. He had been here before, to accept the United Nations Human Rights Prize for the work of his Initiative for the Resurgence of the Abolitionist Movement, in 2013, and to meet with organizations sympathetic to his cause. But this occasion was different. For the past eighteen months, Abeid had been in prison in Mauritania, along with a fellow-activist, Brahim Ramdhane, after being convicted of protesting without official authorization, belonging to an unauthorized organization, and stirring unrest. Abeid had been imprisoned before, for a few months at a time, for acts of protest, but this was by far his longest sentence.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
So Palpable a Stain: The Adams Family and Slavery in Washington, D.C.
Telling the Story of Slavery
Angola Prison and the Shadow of Slavery

The Brilliance of Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, and Wayde Van Niekerk

During the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson will be discussing the track-and-field events. Part one, on Caster Semenya and Olympic economics, can be read here.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?
Michael Phelps’s Most Memorable Race
Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition

The Appalling Last Act of Rudy Giuliani

There was a moment during Rudolph Giuliani’s extended exchange with Chris Cuomo, on CNN, last Thursday morning when the former mayor had the look of a man posing for a portrait to be titled, simply, “After.” The “Before” could’ve been taken at nearly any moment prior to Giuliani’s endorsement of Donald Trump, his near-deafening Convention speech in Cleveland, or the frantic grasping for relevance that has defined his recent public presence. Trump’s campaign has compromised so many prominent conservatives—particularly the troika of Reince Priebus, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan—that it’s almost possible to overlook the way it has initiated the grim denouement of Giuliani’s career. “After” began at the precise moment that Giuliani, a man whose own political career was marked by a defense of undocumented immigrants, hitched his political fortunes to the most prominent xenophobe in recent American history.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Trump Blames Bad Poll Numbers on Existence of Numerical System
What We Learned About Trump’s Supporters This Week
How Hillary Clinton Became a Better Economic Populist Than Donald Trump

Humayun Khan Isn’t the Only Muslim American Hero

I went to Arlington National Cemetery this month to visit the grave of Humayun Khan, the Muslim soldier killed in Iraq whose father spoke at the Democratic Convention. I walked among four hundred thousand white marble headstones to Section 60, the fourteen-acre plot for the fatalities of America’s recent wars. Khan, a handsome man with penetrating eyes, died when a suicide bomber driving an orange taxi sped toward his base. He shouted “Hit the dirt!” to his men while he tried to stop it. The bomb detonated. Khan was twenty-seven. He was posthumously awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. His grave-site locator is 7986. He is buried between Jeremiah Savage, who died in Iraq, and Robert Mogensen, who was killed in Afghanistan—all three within seventeen days in May, 2004.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
What Donald Trump Doesn’t Get About Ghazala and Khizr Khan
The Orlando Shootings and American Muslims
Donald Trump’s Crowd Cheers His Muslim Exclusion Plan

Can Ashton Eaton Save the Decathlon?

Ten years ago, Tate Metcalf, a high-school track coach in Bend, Oregon, was trying to find a college that would give one of his athletes a scholarship. Ashton Eaton was a talented sprinter with a fierce long jump, but Metcalf received mostly lukewarm responses. His coach felt that Eaton would have the best shot at getting into a Division I college if he competed in one of track and field’s multi-event disciplines, like the heptathlon or the decathlon. Metcalf knew it would make Eaton, who was raised by a single mother and had never had any private coaching, one of the first people in his family to go to college. So he suggested it. “Sure,” Eaton replied, as Metcalf recently recalled. Then Eaton said, “What’s the decathlon?”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Meb Keflezighi, Bernard Lagat, and the Secret to Running Forever
The Deceptive Calm of Olympic Open-Water Swimming
The Brilliance of Usain Bolt, Mo Farah, and Wayde Van Niekerk

The Agony and Ecstasy of India at the Olympics

Not long ago, I discovered that I could own a piece of my childhood trauma if I shelled out sixteen dollars on eBay. The August 22-28, 1976, issue of the Illustrated Weekly of India, which came out just after the Montreal Olympics, bore the following headline: “600 Million Indians—Not One Bronze!” The men’s field-hockey team, which had won the World Cup the previous year, finished seventh in Montreal. It was the first time since 1924 that the team had returned from the Olympics without a medal. I was thirteen then and do not remember whether the report in the Illustrated Weekly offered me any consolation. It probably didn’t, since the headline is the only thing that has remained in my memory. Which is all to say that, if for the rest of the world the Olympic Games represent glorious achievement through sports, for many urban, educated, middle-class Indians, they offer only a ritual wallowing in a feeling of failure.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
A Graphic Novelist Captures the Paradoxes of Living in the “New India”
Michael Phelps and His Swim Cap
Women’s Gymnastics Deserves Better TV Coverage

What We Learned About Trump’s Supporters This Week

If Donald Trump loses the Presidential election, this week may be remembered as the point in the campaign when his defeat became obvious and inevitable. The number of controversies, reckless statements, and outright lies from Trump this week was dizzying. He toyed with the idea of political assassination, declaring that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Hillary Clinton or her judicial nominees if she were elected. He called Barack Obama “the founder” of ISIS. Trump kept the fact-checkers, the hardest-working journalists of 2016, busy. The Associated Press reported that Trump confused an expensive babysitting program for the children of guests at his exclusive hotels with a nonexistent company child-care program for workers. The Washington Post noted that a story, confirmed as true by the Trump campaign, about Trump ferrying stranded soldiers with his private plane in 1991, was untrue. And Trump once again refused to release his tax returns, a break with a tradition that goes back to the nineteen-seventies.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
The Ordinary Outrage of the Baltimore Police Report
How Hillary Clinton Became a Better Economic Populist Than Donald Trump
Daily Cartoon: Friday, August 12th

Michael Phelps’s Most Memorable Race

Before these Olympic Games, Michael Phelps was the answer to a trivia question: Who is the most decorated athlete in the history of the modern Summer Olympics?

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Caster Semenya and the Logic of Olympic Competition
Simone Biles Becomes the Greatest Gymnast of All Time
The Murky History of the Butterfly Stroke

Ninety Years of Fidel Castro

Fidel Castro is turning ninety on Saturday. It has been a long life, and a most eventful one. He was born on July 13, 1926, three years before the Great Crash and the start of the global depression. Feature films were still silent; commercial air travel was in its infancy; most people who moved around the globe did so by ship; many navies still used sailing ships. The telephone existed, but for instant global communication and news, the telegram was still the thing. Most cars still had to be started with a hand crank.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Vital Rituals of the Afro-Cuban Underground
Fidel Speaks, and Raúl Stays on, in Cuba
Cuba After Obama Left

Walmart’s Three-Billion-Dollar Hire

Last year, an entrepreneur named Marc Lore announced that he was going to get people to do their online shopping on a new Web site he had created, Jet.com, instead of on Amazon. It was a bold claim—even Walmart, the world’s biggest retailer by far, hadn’t managed to touch Amazon when it came to online retail—but people took Lore seriously because he had a track record. Earlier, he’d co-founded Diapers.com, sold it reluctantly to Amazon for more than five hundred million dollars, and gone on to work at Amazon; he knew more than most people about not only how to compete with Amazon but also what went on inside of that secretive and enormously successful corporation. Lore was able to raise a huge sum of venture capital to fund his project; Bloomberg Businessweek put him on its cover, with the headline “Amazon Bought This Man’s Company. Now He’s Coming for Them.”

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
Apple, Google, Amazon, and the Advantages of Bigness
An E-Commerce Challenge in Africa: Selling to People Who Aren’t Online
Why Would Amazon Want To Be the New Barnes & Noble?